Joseph-Félix Muller

Artist
(1955)

The self-taught painter and sculptor Josef-Felix Müller, born in 1945 in Eggersriet, Switzerland, has conducted his work on the sidelines of Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Informal Art, and was involved in German neo-Expressionism. He has explored the resources of engraving, uses ink over large surfaces, and creates gigantic prints. Lithography subsequently broadened his graphic experience; the lithographs acquired by the FRAC Centre, produced out of an inner necessity looking for new expressive and formal possibilities, can logically be placed alongside his work involving wooden sculptures carved with an axe (Drei kriechende Figuren, 1985): the lines in them are incisive and rough. The themes of mutilation, self-mutilation, and sexual relations between people and animals recur regularly in his work of the 1980s. His more recent paintings depicting landscapes, water and fire are more akin to hyperrealism (Berchtesgadener Alpen, 2000-2001; Eiswasser I, 2008-2009 and Feuer I, 2010). Since 1975, Müller has been living at Sankt Gallen in Switzerland where he co-founded the Kunsthalle which he directed from 1993 to 1995. Since 1996, he has been teaching visual arts at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and exhibiting his work mainly in Europe.